South Korean police are seeking to arrest dozens of suspects who have been deported from Cambodia over alleged links to so-called “pig butchering” scams.
Seoul’s National Police Agency said on Monday it was seeking warrants for 58 of the 64 South Korean nationals who were repatriated from Cambodia over the weekend, after being held there over their suspected links to the scams.
One of the repatriated individuals has already been arrested, while five others have been released, officials said.
The repatriations, which saw the returned South Korean nationals escorted off their flight in handcuffs, have come amid a push by Seoul to tackle the issue of its nationals becoming involved in the scams.
The South Korean government believes about 1,000 of its citizens are working in Cambodian scam centres, where workers are often lured through fake job offers, before being trafficked into work defrauding victims online.
‘Pig butchering’
The trafficked workers are held against their will at the compounds and forced to carry out online fraud against victims around the world, luring their targets into fake romantic relationships online, before persuading them to invest large sums into fraudulent cryptocurrency platforms.
The practice is known as “pig butchering” – a euphemism for fattening up a victim before they are slaughtered.
Park Sung-joo, head of South Korea’s National Office of Investigation, told reporters last week that the repatriated group had been linked to crimes including voice phishing, romance scams and other fraud schemes.
National Security Adviser Wi Sung-lac previously said the detained individuals included both “voluntary and involuntary participants” in the scams.
Public outcry
South Korea sent a delegation to Cambodia last week, headed by the deputy foreign minister and including police as well as intelligence agents, to discuss the scam centre issue, which it says has resulted in the kidnapping of dozens of South Koreans.
The push follows public outcry over the killing of a South Korean college student in Cambodia, who was found dead in a pick-up truck in August after having allegedly been kidnapped and tortured by a scam centre crime ring.
Seoul also announced a ban on travel to parts of Cambodia last week, amid concerns over its citizens being kidnapped and forced into working for the scam centres.
The measures come amid recent moves by other governments to crack down on the scam centres, which have ballooned into a multibillion-dollar illicit industry since the COVID-19 pandemic, when the global shutdown saw many Chinese-owned casinos and hotels in the country pivot to illicit operations.
Last week, the United States and United Kingdom announced sweeping sanctions against a Cambodia-based multinational crime network, identified as the Prince Group, for running a chain of “scam centres” across the region. US Attorney General Pam Bondi called the move “one of the most significant strikes ever against the global scourge of human trafficking and cyber-enabled financial fraud”.
On Friday, Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported that police in Tokyo had arrested three people for their involvement in Cambodia-based scams.
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